Letters: 7/5/18

Mayor Christine Berg has lost the privilege to represent the people of Lafayette. She should resign due to conflicts of interest or be recalled. Berg has consistently steered the City Council majority to act in the best interest of Extraction, Inc.’s proposed encroachment into residential areas for fracking, rather than working to ensure the health and safety of citizens.

The mayor should resign or be recalled for leading a sustained campaign of disinformation at City Council meetings and other public forums. Falsehoods told directly to teary-eyed mothers begging for any reassurance of their children’s safety during City Council meetings are disgraceful.

Initial citizen concerns about fracking were dismissed by the mayor, who argued that there hadn’t been drilling in Lafayette in 25 years, and so there’s nothing to worry about.

Lafayette passed a ban on fracking by ballot initiative with 60 percent support and was sued. The mayor, along with the 2014 council, kicked the citizen supporters and community rights argument out of the lawsuit, handing a win to the industry. The mayor loves the mantra “we were sued, and we lost” when asked why she’s not enforcing our current ban on fracking. This is a frequent lie by omission.

When offered pro-bono legal help from the foremost environmental rights legal network, the mayor wouldn’t even hear them until citizens campaigned for a public forum.

Lastly, she works for Mom’s Clean Air Force, a project of the Environmental Defense Fund, a well-documented front group of the oil and gas industry, which supports “market based” solutions to pollution — like “regulations” that protect no one, while they allow the drilling to continue.

Time to resign, Mayor.

Terra Rafael/Lafayette

United States of America

From our beginning as people who came uninvited to the shores of what is now known as the United States of America we have always been aggressive. Only now is our aggression, violence and ignorance on the table, bloody hands-up and in the form of our leader Donald Trump who is not the cause but the representative of our historical unconscious acts. It is now the time for self-reflection in that when we look within our personal lives and truly see, without judgement or justification, our sins against first ourselves then others and our Natural world that we find our power to not put up with our common condition.

David Krest/via internet

Trump’s America

“A public official may not appoint, employ, promote, advance, or advocate for appointment, employment, promotion, or advancement, in or to a civilian position in the agency in which he is serving or over which he exercises jurisdiction or control any individual who is a relative of the public official.”

“We are just enforcing the law.”

“We were just following orders.”

One quote is from America’s Constitution, one is from The White House and one is and shall remain an indefensible excuse for tyranny.